Tag: New Horizons
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Pluto and Charon as never seen before
A spectacular sampling of imagery from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveals mountains and water ice bedrock on Pluto, an active crust on its largest moon Charon and the first resolved views of the icy world’s tiny mini-moons. A snapshot of Pluto shows fresh deposits of water ice bedrock and 11,000-foot mountains, revealing evidence Pluto’s surface…
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NASA to release new Pluto images
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern reacts to fresh imagery of Pluto downlinked Wednesday. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls Scientists are crunching data for a press conference Wednesday, and there is high anticipation for the release of the first close-up images from Tuesday’s historic flyby of Pluto. The last image returned by New Horizons came to Earth…
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Take a sneak peek at Pluto
Photo credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI Pluto’s salmon-colored surface shines in an incredible view taken Monday as New Horizons barreled toward the icy outpost for Tuesday’s historic close-up flyby. Scientists early Tuesday released a sneak peek of Pluto taken by New Horizons around 4 p.m. EDT (2000 GMT) Monday at a range of 476,000 miles (766,000 kilometers), about…
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Scientists wowed by new views of ‘psychedelic’ Pluto
Pluto and its Texas-sized moon Charon share an alien environment on the solar system’s outer frontier, with patches of organic ices and diverse rock types illustrated in color imagery released Tuesday. Speaking hours after NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed 7,700 miles from Pluto on the first-ever encounter with the mystery world, scientists said early images…
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Humanity’s first ambassador to Pluto makes historic flyby
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft returned this photo of Pluto late Monday, the last view of the icy world before Tuesday’s flyby. Photo credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI A speedy space probe barreled past Pluto for a one-shot flyby Tuesday, becoming the first spacecraft to ever visit the frozen, reddish world at the solar system’s distant frontier 85 years…
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New Horizons calls home
New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern celebrates the reception of the first signals from New Horizons after a historic encounter with faraway Pluto. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls A long-awaited radio signal from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft landed on planet Earth late Tuesday, confirming the faraway space probe performed as expected during a one-shot flyby of Pluto…
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See NASA’s Pluto explorer before embarkment from Earth
Photo credit: Ben Cooper/Launchphotography.com NASA’s New Horizons probe, armored for a nine-year journey through the cold, inhospitable depths of space, launched Jan. 19, 2006, from Cape Canaveral. Fitted with seven instruments to map Pluto’s topography, atmosphere and composition, New Horizons is approaching the frozen world for a flyby Tuesday nearly three billion miles from Earth.…
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Cliffs, chasms and craters revealed in latest New Horizons images
An annotated version of an image of Pluto captured July 11 by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) instrument. Pluto’s northern hemisphere appears in the image, with its equator near the bottom of the disk. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI The first hints of dramatic cliffs, chasms and craters are showing up in new imagery of Pluto…
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Pluto probe project manager gives advice to team
New Horizons project manager Glen Fountain, a veteran of nearly 50 years at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, told the Pluto probe’s team to live in the moment for Tuesday’s historic flyby, but look out for last-minute snags. Email the author. Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.
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Clear sailing expected for Pluto flyby
There is no sign of an undiscovered moon lurking around Pluto in data streaming back to Earth from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, and that is surprising to Alan Stern, the scientist in charge of the probe. Stern told reporters Sunday his biggest surprise from New Horizons’ first glances at Pluto is the lack of more moons…